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                    <h2><i>What is Mapster?</i></h2>
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                <p>
                    Mapster is designed to inform travellers about the overall safety of a given country or region. Without reading website upon  website, travellers can get the 'big picture' about the safety of a country just by looking at our intensity maps - either an overall score or scores based on individual safety concerns such as crime or natural disasters. Mapster also lets users look real-time and historical travel warnings from the <a href="http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_1764.html">U.S. Department of State</a> and <a href="http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/">U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office</a>.  
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                    <h2><i>Who is Mapster for?</i></h2>
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                    Generally, Mapster is for people who travel internationally.  If you're travelling to the state or province next door, our information may not be detailed enough for you.
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                    <h2><i>How does Mapster work?</i></h2>
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                    At a high level, Mapster analyzes the news of the day for every country.  To determine the 'safety score' of a country, we look at several possible components of the news such as Crime & Terrorism, Epidemics, Politics & Religion, Natural Disasters and Nuclear incidents.  This news is combined with Twitter information from the U.S. Department of State and U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office to get a wider range of credible information.  We assume that if we don't find any 'bad' information about a destination in the current news that it is safe to travel to that country.  News information is updated every 24 hours.
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                    <h2><i>What do the colors on the map and 'Safety Score' tell me?</i></h2>
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                    The safety score is a score between 0 and 1 generated for each country.  A country with score 0 is considered safe, while a country with safety score 1 is considered unsafe.  The colors on the map correspond to the score of that country: green indicates a score between 0 and .33, yellow indicates a score between .33 and .66, orange indicates a score between .66 and .9 and red indicates a score between .9 and 1. The 'All' map displays the overall safety scores for the countries, while the other options show the score for that subset of information.  For example, the 'Crime and Terrorism' map shows the intensity map for the world only based on crime and terrorism news.  The 'Twitter' map shows the intensity map based on only the information from Twitter.
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                    <h2><i>What do the tweets about a country tell me?</i></h2>
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                    We only analyze tweets from the U.S. Department of State and U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office as their tweets about a given country are usually travel alerts or warnings for that country.  These tweets will contain up-to-the minute information about a given country along with up to six months of information about that country from older tweets. As we are only looking for unsafe situations, it's a good thing if there are no tweets for the country that you want to go to!
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                    <h2><i>What future work is there?</i></h2>
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                <p>
                    There is plenty of future work, considering this project was completed over a short time frame and with a low budget.  We can certainly expand the list of countries we cover, and look into compiling for states/provinces and regions (such as the Middle East).  We could also refine our scoring algorithm, look for new sources of input and improve the user interface by providing more detailed information about a country to the user (more news links).  An interesting expansion opportunity would be to look at the nationality of the user and figure out if that changed the countries that they could not or should not travel to.
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                Information gathered from <a href="http://www.bing.com">Bing</a>, <a href="http://nytimes.com">New York Times</a>, <a href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a> and <a href="http://www.usatoday.com">USA Today</a>.
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                &#169 Mapster Travel Services.  All Rights Reserved. Final project for <a href="http://courses.cse.tamu.edu/caverlee/csce470/" target="_blank" color="#000000">CSCE 470 Fall 2011</a> at <a href="http://www.tamu.edu" target="_blank">Texas A&M University</a>.
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